"Posterity, you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that ever I took half the pains to preserve it." -John Adams

Welcome to Patriot's Lament. We strive here to educate ourselves on Liberty. We will not worry ourselves so much with the daily antics of American politics, and drown ourselves in the murky waters of the political right or left.Instead, we will look to the Intellectuals and Champions of Liberty, and draw on their wisdom of what it is to be a truly free people. We will learn from where our Providential Liberties are derived, and put the proper perspective of a Free Individual and the State.Please join us!

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Government: a Violent Destructive Superstition

Let me start by saying that part of me hopes you do not end up agreeing with me and advocating this as you will end up very far out in the political wilderness (actually entirely beyond it in a barren land). It seems that most people need baby steps along the way. They refuse to reject theft and the initiation of violence against their neighbor on "merely ideological" grounds. What I advocate is peace. It is voluntary cooperation. It is society organized around mutual benefit, not mutually assured destruction. It is either seriously flawed, or it's way too much for the slaves still suffering from Stockholm Syndrome to accept. Potentially both. Read on and decide for yourself.

Orwell observed that the first step towards intellectual tyranny was when language was altered so as to make expression of heretical thoughts impossible. The word "anarchy" has been altered by the state. I will not let them have it.

• (uncountable) The state of a society being without authoritarians or a governing body.

• (uncountable) Anarchism; the political theory that a community is best organized by the voluntary cooperation of individuals, rather than by a government, which is regarded as being coercive by nature.

• (countable) A chaotic and confusing absence of any form of political authority or government.

• confusion in general; disorder

The state convinces us of the latter two definitions so that it can enslave us. Without the state there would be Chaos! Without the state the sun will not rise! Without the state you would have to be responsible for your actions! The most vocal opponents of liberty are our fellow prisoners (those ruled by the state). This means the state has done its job. It has convinced the prisoners to use social pressure in order to keep their fellow inmates from leaving, even though there are no guards and the door is wide open. The myth of anarchy as "chaos" is that political authority (government) is the only way in which chaos and confusion can be created and propagated on a large scale. Government creates chaos or convinces people that freedom is chaos so that it can impose rules which were completely unnecessary in its absence. This is called ordo ab chao, latin for "order out of chaos." Of course "chaos" is simply a word for order which we do not yet understand. The history of the state is one of oppressing that which it does not understand. The history of human progress is embracing and studying that which we do not yet understand. Murray Rothbard characterized this struggle as one between "Power and Market."

The formation of any codified "civil law" will be necessarily limited (imperfect) because it is implemented by man who is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. For example, because we are imperfect, none of us can actually perfectly understand and interpret the Bible. Christ himself had fun with this when he was a teenager in the temple ... the "experts in the law" hated him for it. Therefore, any codified law is imperfect, either in its wording or in its interpretation ... but once it is codified all the individuals within the jurisdiction are subject to it. Worse still, the ability to alter it in order to reduce the degree of imperfection is placed in the hands of those presumptuous enough to have imposed it in the first place. The individual seeking justice cannot take their appeal elsewhere. There are no market forces acting to improve law, there is no competition. Instead law is socialized from the moment it is codified. Socialism always leads to decreasing quality at an increasing cost due to the lack of a pricing mechanism (which would gauge supply and demand). All government is socialism.

The Constitution was never better than it was on day one. It was all downhill from there. Why was it good on day one? Why did some of the anti-federalists assume the authority to subject those they were "representing" to it? Because it represented fairly accurately the private law that colonists were observing at the time in order to conduct business with each other anyway. It reflected the norms at the time, but not for long, because once the authority to decide what law in the colonies was to be was taken from the people in their private interactions and centralized, it could become "out of step" with no meaningful recourse. The law before codification was dependent upon the moral character of individuals in their daily interactions with other individuals (thus providing immediate feedback ... "that guy is a scam artist, don't to business with him" ... etc). An immoral society would fail. A moral one would succeed. A shyster would be run out of town. People indeed "took the law into their own hands." Once codified however, the law became dependent upon the whims of those who actively seek power. The expectation of enforcement was also socialized. There were concerns when the NYPD was founded that it would result in a citizenry who does not feel it is their responsibility to defend their neighbor against crime. Years later there is the murder of Kitty Genovese.

So codified civil law may not be so bad at first when these men came from an educated and largely moral society, but I think it would be fair to say that the Federal officials have always been a step or two ahead of private criminals when it comes to violating what the vast majority of individuals consider to be their rights. Government theft in America has exceeded private theft for every year the Republic has existed. All government is theft.

All political systems imaginable and all those that have existed in history stand in violation of "love your neighbors as yourself" as they all violate this principle. All political systems are based on theft and apply justice asymmetrically in order to hide from their inherent moral and ethical dilemma. Libertarians are indeed mostly an "I've got mine Jack!" group, because libertarians are politically minded. The incentive for political participation is the possibility to take the reins of a system of coercion for personal benefit. This system has always appealed to the lowest in man. The market anarchist proposes abolition of this monopoly on the use of force so that all involved must succeed or fail based on their own merit and that no individual can live outside of the law by claiming to be part of the ruling class (which no longer exists). The market, being a cooperative social system based on voluntary participation, requires equal application of the law in order to operate most efficiently, thus the market anarchist must be concerned with how the law is being applied to his neighbors, because indeed his well being is inextricably tied to that of his neighbors (whereas under any political system, he can be better off by making them worse off through "legal plunder"). In contrast to market anarchy which is based on peaceful interpersonal exchange, all government is the initiation of coercive violence.

This is the contradiction that minarchists (libertarians) have to struggle with constantly. Republicans and Democrats do not have this struggle because at their core, they oppose voluntaryism and advocate authoritarianism. Their philosophy is consistent, but it is consistent only with tyranny. The libertarian wants to have it both ways. They want "liberty with minimal oppression." The anarchist however has a philosophy consistent with "equality under the law" ... which is only possible in a horizontally structured social system, the one we know as "the free market" as organized by the rules we call "private property" which is fundamentally based on our respect for everyone else's property, and only secondarily on the defense of our own. A fence is only effective if our neighbors respect it, which only happens if we respect theirs. In the absence of a state which grants exceptions to these social norms (natural law or the golden rule) violations are clear for all to see. Right and wrong are apparent to all. The blurring of these lines does not occur when arbitrary authority is abolished, but instead only when it is granted to a privileged few, which is the inevitable outcome of all systems of government.

With that, I will leave you with an observation that a wise man named Helio made in regards to journey to this philosophy (which mirrors my own).

"You know, I think the main reason most minarchist libertarians resist anarchism isn't academic an reason. They have a deep familial connection to America, its culture, history, symbols and general collectivism and it feels like cutting off your right arm to question it. So minarchism is really just a way to defend the institutions they love, while giving them the benefit of seeking more liberty. I say this because that describes exactly what I went through. If that is generally true, then the motivation to still participate and use the state to create more liberty comes from nationalism. A libertarian becomes an anarchist when they give up that superstition."

-Helio

If you choose to let go of that superstition by rejecting theft and violence on principle because they are immoral means regardless of the ends, and come join us beyond the political wilderness, there is one priceless benefit. There are no politicians, and there never will be.

"Inasmuch as the Constitution was never signed, nor agreed to, by anybody, as a contract, and therefore never bound anybody, and is now binding upon nobody; and is, moreover, such an one as no people can ever hereafter be expected to consent to, except as they may be forced to do so at the point of the bayonet, it is perhaps of no importance what its true legal meaning, as a contract, is. Nevertheless, the writer thinks it proper to say that, in his opinion, the Constitution is no such instrument as it has generally been assumed to be; but that by false interpretations, and naked usurpations, the government has been made in practice a very widely, and almost wholly, different thing from what the Constitution itself purports to authorize. He has heretofore written much, and could write much more, to prove that such is the truth. But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain – that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist."

"The rule of the state is the rule of death through the power of the law. It is man’s way and it accomplishes nothing toward delivering us from evil as it subjects humankind under the terror of violence and forceful coercion, which is to say, it is evil. Not only does it fail to solve our sin problem, it facilitates and exacerbates every aspect of our depravity and is the ultimate agent of human rebellion against the Creator. The state has always pitted the strength of man against the Almighty and is unable to do otherwise. Humanity strives through history to unite in opposition to God just as our ancestors first did on a plain in Shinar at a place called Babel. They tried to build a tower to heaven. We build bridges to nowhere, believing that our work will make us free. We have not yet managed to come together again as one since our languages were confused and our families scattered across the face of the earth, but always and everywhere we form centers of human power, consolidating the strength of many, yielding it up to the hands of a few and exchanging our freedom for an unholy independence from the very source of our existence."

"Our long-standing love affair with the myth of the rule of law has made us blind to the latter possibility. Like the Monosizeans, who after centuries of state control cannot imagine a society in which people can buy whatever size shoes they wish, we cannot conceive of a society in which individuals may purchase the legal services they desire. The very idea of a free market in law makes us uncomfortable. But it is time for us to overcome this discomfort and consider adopting Socrates' approach. We must recognize that our love for the rule of law is unrequited, and that, as so often happens in such cases, we have become enslaved to the object of our desire. No clearer example of this exists than the legal process by which our Constitution was transformed from a document creating a government of limited powers and guaranteed rights into one which provides the justification for the activities of the all-encompassing super-state of today. However heart-wrenching it may be, we must break off this one-sided affair. The time has come for those committed to individual liberty to realize that the establishment of a truly free society requires the abandonment of the myth of the rule of law."

Hans Hoppe contrasts monarchy and democracy and the superiority of private law societies (under which the rules most congruent with the nature of existence would be the most successful)

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